“Commitment and bravery!” he laughs. “But you also need to be tidy – it’s easy to over-drive it, especially here at Donington. But I’ve been really surprised at how you can chuck it around. It’s quite a benign car on the limit and although you feel like you have to wait for the understeer to pass when you turn into the corner, you can wind the throttle on and it turns into oversteer on corner exit. It just does stuff SUVs shouldn’t – when you’ve got it in Race mode it pops off kerbs like a touring car and feels totally set up for this kind of thing, which is really weird!”
He’s not wrong either. Sitting up so high while driving round a race track is a bizarre sensation. But Brise’s assessment is bang on – the Stelvio behaves in a way you really wouldn’t expect of such a vehicle. Even accounting for the weight it’s fast, the twin-turbo V6 sounding rude in its Race mode and pulling hard all the way to the redline in classically Italian fashion. The eight-speed gearbox is a traditional automatic, though the big shifter paddles feel lifted straight out of a Ferrari and respond with commendable precision.